With West Elm Furnishings, de Blasio Family Wanted Gracie Mansion to Feel ‘Lived in’

A room in Gracie Mansion designed by West Elm and featured on the company’s blog is pictured.

West Elm

The de Blasio family has taken a first big step toward making Gracie Mansion its own: furnishing the historic home with a donation from West Elm, a chain furniture store that helps the mayor maintain the populist image he campaigned on.

But in tapping a major international furniture brand, Mr. de Blasio has also stepped on some toes in Brooklyn, where antique vendors and artisan craftsmen were dismayed to hear that Mr. de Blasio was working with a big company instead of independent locals.

“The de Blasio family was turning a museum back into a home,” explained Rebecca Katz, a spokeswoman for Mr. de Blasio, who said the retail value of the furnishings would have been $65,000. (Mr. de Blasio’s predecessor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, hosted events at Gracie Mansion but lived in a Manhattan townhouse.)

Ms. Katz said the de Blasios have West Elm furniture in their Park Slope house, and are “fans of the Brooklyn-based company,” which opened its first shop in the borough’s Dumbo neighborhood.

The brand may have Brooklyn roots, but some in the borough’s vibrant crafts community were less than impressed. “West Elm is a little bit better than Ikea, but …. they produce ordinary furniture for the masses,” said Deger Cengiz, the owner of Voos Furniture, a retailer in Brooklyn that sells furniture crafted by Brooklyn locals. “He’s the mayor — not an ordinary person — so he should not be thinking about which place is cheaper. His first choice should be something New Yorkers touched with their hands, with special details.”

Mr. de Blasio campaigned on a promise to narrow the city’s income gap and has meticulously presented himself as an everyday Brooklyn dad, shoveling his own snow and carrying his own luggage. The optics are a major break from Mr. Bloomberg, a wealthy Manhattan businessman who attended high-society galas and frequently jetted to Bermuda.

A room in Gracie Mansion designed by West Elm and featured on the company’s blog is pictured.

West Elm

Vanessa Holden, the creative director for West Elm, said Chirlane McCray, the first lady, reached out to West Elm. Along with her children and husband, Ms. McCray earlier this week moved into the mansion, which has hosted mayors since 1942. Ms. Holden said Ms. McCray “wanted Gracie to feel … relaxed and lived in.” Although the furniture was a donation to the Gracie Mansion Conservancy, the nonprofit group that maintains the house, “the value we offer appealed to them,” Ms. Holden said.

The choice is fairly consistent with the mayor’s apparent ethos, some said. Jim Druckman, the president of the New York Design Center, said West Elm has a reputation in the interior-design world as “good modern design and even better value.”

“If it fits the mayor’s family’s needs and taste, it is certainly a good choice for the family’s private rooms,” he said.

Some of the city’s big names in fashion declined to opine on the choice. Muriel Brandolini, an interior designer known for loud and lavish looks, said she “[doesn’t] shop there.” Kris Fuchs, principal at the high-end furniture store Suite New York, said she doesn’t know West Elm well, “but there’s a saying: ‘If it’s free, it’s for me.’”

J.P. Ferraioli, the manager of Yesterday’s News, a vintage furniture shop not far from Mr. de Blasio’s Brooklyn home, had mixed feelings on the mansion’s new furnishing, but said they might be an improvement over some of the mayor’s previous design choices.

“I saw … the stuff he put out front of his house,” Mr. Ferraioli said, referring to the goods the de Blasio family gave out for free when they were cleaning out their Park Slope home. In Gracie Mansion, he said, “that wouldn’t look too good.”